Strange Elections

With the U.S. Presidential election just one year from today, I thought I’d take this opportunity to reflect on some of the strangeness in our electoral past. Given the Hobson’s choice (in my view at least) in 2004 and the 2000 voting controversy, one would be forgiven for thinking that it is our recent past which has produced the most strange presidential elections.

In fact, the 2000 election was the fourth time that a candidate became president without receiving a plurality of the popular vote. This also happened in the elections of 1876 and 1888, and in the election of 1824, John Quincy Adams received a plurality in neither the popular nor the electoral vote. Adams was selected president by a vote in the House of Representatives.

But my vote for the most strange presidential election in history must go to the election of 1872…

Republican incumbent, Ulysses S. Grant, sullied by a series of corruption scandals and the general incompetence of his administration, nevertheless won the Republican nomination. 

But a dissatisfied faction of the Republican party formed the new Liberal Republican Party. Charles Francis Adams, both son and grandson of former presidents, lost the nomination of this new party to New York Tribune editor, Horace Greeley.

Greeley, a onetime Grant supporter, was a social idealist whose frumpy appearance, eccentric habits and odd mannerisms made him an object of ridicule.

In his editorial career, Greeley insisted that the word “news” was plural. He once cabled a Tribune reporter: “ARE THERE ANY NEWS?” The employee cabled back: “NOT A NEW”. Yet Greeley won the nomination of the Liberal Republican Party against Adams with Benjamin Gratz Brown as his running mate. Brown did not help the campaign much, drinking heavily throughout and making a series of gaffes during summer – such as trying to cook a watermelon at a public picnic.

The Democrats saw no viable alternative. Incredibly, they also nominated the Greeley/Brown ticket. This seemed to open a floodgate of minor contenders such as free-thinking suffragette, Victoria Woodhull (although she herself couldn’t vote at the time), her running mate and former slave, Frederick Douglass, Bourbon Democrat Charles O’Conor and the Prohibition Party’s James Black.

Strangest of all, perhaps, was millionaire George Francis Train. Train, an eccentric shipping magnate and world traveler was supposedly one of the inspirations for Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days (though Train’s trip only took 67 days).

Train ran as an independent and promised to make himself dictator if elected. He also charged admission fees to his speeches and became the only candidate to turn a profit from his candidacy. His showing in the polls was negligible, unsurprisingly, as was the Woodhull/Douglass ticket’s.

Greeley, reeling from public ridicule and personal grief (his wife wife had died on October 30th), was crushed by Grant in the polls and also lost his editorial position at the New York Tribune. Greeley’s mental and physical health swiftly declined and he died only three weeks after the election – before the electoral votes were cast. Consequently, the few electoral votes Greeley earned went to Brown instead.

Thus Ulysses S. Grant was elected to a second term as President of the United States in what might have been the strangest election of all time.